Martin Ruef's Between Slavery and Capitalism synthesizes and expands nearly a decade of his research on the transition from slavery after the American Civil War. The text comes at a moment when historians are paying increased attention to the relationship between slavery and American capitalism. Numerous new texts—including, notably, Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton (2014), Edward Baptist's The Half that Has Never Been Told (2014), and Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams (2013)—explore the ways in which slavery and the slave trade were commercially sophisticated and at times highly capitalistic. Though Ruef, a sociologist at Duke University, does not engage directly in this conversation, business historians interested in these debates will find much of value in his book.

The period immediately after the Civil War involved a dramatic “transition and clash in economic institutions” [italics in original] (p. 2). For Ruef, the most important characteristic of this transition was “enduring uncertainty” [italics in original] (p. 3). All participants in the economy—from wealthy planters, to freedmen, to poor and middling whites—faced uncertainties about the ways their lives and livelihoods would change after the war. The institution of slavery had, among other things, been a means of managing uncertainty: slavery solidified social and occupational hierarchies, it offered long-term guarantees of labor, and it reinforced and legitimized particular cultural norms. The Civil War disrupted these norms, and Ruef explores the ways men and women attempted to deal with the resulting instability. He deftly uses both qualitative and quantitative sources, including census data, slave narratives, contracts, and the Federal Writers' Project.

Ruef divides his analysis between “classical” and “categorical” uncertainty, both of which are distinct from risk. Risk involves making judgments when the precise outcome is unknown but the probability of various possibilities can be estimated. By contrast, classical uncertainty involves decision making when the probability distribution of outcomes is unknown. The possible outcomes can be identified but not their likelihoods. Under categorical uncertainty even less is known: the set of possible outcomes cannot even be identified or classified.

Ruef organizes his text in three parts: individual, organizational, and community. In the first section (chapters 2 to 4), he focuses on individual uncertainties such as wage rates, jobs, and class status. For example, how were wages set, and how did wage levels relate to slave valuation before the war? What social positions and occupations would be open to blacks and whites during Reconstruction? In the second section (chapters 5 and 6), Ruef turns to organizational uncertainties: Would the former slaves remain as laborers on plantations? And if not, what alternative organizational structures were conceivable? Finally, section three (chapters 7 and 8) deals with what Ruef calls community uncertainties. Though this category is the least clear in Ruef's triad, it offers the opportunity to consider broader questions of regional investment in agriculture versus industry as well as to discuss the potential for alternatives to cotton monocropping.

Business historians will find the chapters on organizational structure (chapters 5 and 6) to be among the most interesting in the volume. Moments of such dramatic change in business models are rare, and this section will be useful even to scholars working outside of the field of slavery studies. Chapter 5 examines the gradual decline of plantations and the rise of sharecropping. Ruef explains this organizational shift through demography. Plantations initially persisted, but planters clung to rigid structures, and over the longer term many slaves chose to depart. Share farming gradually emerged as a viable option for commodity production. Chapter 6 looks at credit and trade in the South. Here Ruef focuses on the uncertainties created by the difficulty of classifying businesses. Many southern firms were hybrids that crossed industries and sectors, and they tended to have lower credit ratings than those that were more specialized.

To the extent that Ruef engages in the debate over whether slavery contributed to the spread of American capitalism, his answer is generally no. Instead of emphasizing the antebellum South's highly commercial nature he focuses on the postwar transition. This leads him to emphasize discontinuity: he rightly sees the South as radically different after the end of slavery, and he describes the society that emerged as more capitalistic than what had come before. New research by historians may change this; scholars are questioning whether, for example, southern financial systems were as “remarkably underdeveloped” as Ruef argues, or if they were different but also highly sophisticated (p. 10). In addition to the texts already mentioned, research like Bonnie Martin's study of slave mortgages (Journal of Southern History [Nov. 2010]) shows a highly developed financial sector—if one that looks little like its modern counterpart.

Elsewhere Ruef argues that the South was precapitalist, because the unfree structure of labor markets distorted investment in certain types of human capital and restricted the allocation of labor. He points out that “turnover” among the enslaved was low, that hiring out constituted a small proportion of all labor, and that the low maintenance costs of the enslaved distorted incentives, encouraging exploitation. These illuminating observations reflect a definition of capitalism that focuses more on “free” labor than on invested capital. Recent research is asking not whether southern capitalism had a free labor market, but whether free labor should be part of the definition of capitalism. That planters treated the enslaved as large fixed costs—more like a railroad superintendent treated his cars than he did his engineers—may have made those planters less humane. But did it make them any less commercial or capitalistic?

Ultimately, these disagreements are more about definitions than substance. Coming from sociology, Ruef is taking on a slightly different set of questions than historians writing about slavery and capitalism. He also highlights important terrain: recent debates have generally paid insufficient attention to the transitional period after the Civil War. Ruef has written a very valuable volume that highlights the most dramatic institutional transition in American history.